Steal Across the Sky

by Nancy Kress

  Terry said, “Shackleton Crater, which we’re driving by right now, lies entirely within the South Pole–Aitken Basin, which is the largest known impact crater not only on the moon, but in the whole solar system. The Basin was named for the things that lie on either side of it: the lunar South Pole and the Aitken crater. The Basin is unique because—”

  Terry rambled on about crustal thickness maps and geochemical signatures. He sounded much more cheerful now that they were away from Selene City. Out here, nobody except Farrington Tours could record anything Cam O’Kane might explode into. Jane, that sweet-natured soul, wouldn’t set Cam off. Frank was presumably her friend. Terry would be rid of all of them by tomorrow, and what could happen before then?

  Frank could have told him.

  He listened to Terry’s scientific information the way he listened to beach waves on his family’s annual vacation to Lake Erie: as soothing background noise. Three hours to the Atoner base.

  Two hours.

  One hour, and they stopped for a cold lunch on the table let down from the ceiling. Cam ate heartily, which reassured Frank. Jane asked Terry what were probably intelligent questions. Finally she turned to Cam and said hesitantly, “Cam, I haven’t wanted to pry and, of course, there’s all that holocast material about the outside of the Atoner base and all your fascinating interviews about your experiences there, but I’m still wondering . . . can you or Frank add anything about what we’re going to see this afternoon?”

  Cam stopped eating, the remains of her sandwich halfway to her mouth. Frank held his breath. But after a long and painful moment—she was capable of saying anything, anything at all—Cam merely said, “No.”

  “Again, I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “You’re not prying. But everything that can be told about the Atoners I already said, and you just said you read it all. The rest can’t be told except to people who were there . . . who saw . . .” She put her sandwich on the table and, to Frank’s dismay, her eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said. And then, with a tartness that Frank hadn’t suspected her of, “It was a natural question, I think.”

  Terry jumped in with information about the elevated mineral abundance right there in the dust and rock under their rover.

  WHEN THEY REACHED THE ATONER BASE, Frank felt his pulse quicken and his diaphragm tighten. Steady, boy. Soon now.

  “There it is!” Terry said, with weary heartiness. “The temporary home of the only other known sentient species in the universe.”

  Not that there was much to see. The base looked exactly as it had when Frank last saw it six months ago, when he first saw it nearly a year ago. A gray opaque Dome, rising from the gray dusty ground littered with gray and black and dull red rocks of varying sizes. Five times before, Frank had walked between a shuttle and this strange upturned bowl: to and from his initial interview, to and from his witness on Susban A, to his final trip back to Earth. His muscles remembered the weird spring-and-fall of walking in a space suit in the one-sixth Earth gravity. His mind remembered the childish sense of amazement: I’m on the moon. His soul remembered the belief that only God could create human beings and dictate their makeup: “Male and female He created them.” All that, before he knew what the Atoners really were and what they had really done.

  Jane peered out the window, twisting sideways on the bench beside Cam. “Terry, are you sure we can’t go outside? We have the EVA equipment. . . .”

  “Absolutely not,” Terry said in a practiced tone. “Our license from the Office of Commercial Space Transportation of the Federal Aviation—”

  Frank caught Cam’s eye and nodded, and they both sprang.

  Frank yanked Terry from his seat and threw him to the small clear space on the floor. The ropes, made from one of Frank’s own shirts torn up just that morning, were already in his hand. He had kept in superb physical condition and he outweighed Terry by at least thirty pounds, and in three minutes Frank had the tour guide bound hands and feet. Cam had no trouble with Jane, either.

  Thy will be done.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Jane screamed, and Frank looked at her in surprise. Sweet old Jane.

  “It’s okay, nobody will hurt you,” Cam said. Her face had gone so white that Frank thought she might faint, except that her dark eyes shone wildly. “I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt anybody. Never again.”

  Terry said with an admirable willed calm—Frank could see the will—“What do you intend to do?”

  “We’re going outside!” Cam cried.

  “You’re already in violation of your signed agreement with Farrington, and going outside isn’t only a danger to you and us, it will expose you to criminal prosecution.”

  “You’d have made a good cop,” Frank said. It was his highest praise, or at least once it would have been. “But we have to do this.”

  Frank turned off all radio transmissions. He pulled open the storage locker and he and Cam donned EVA suits. It all came back to him, the right order for each piece of equipment, the procedures to check each other’s suits, the weight of the helmet in his hands.

  “If we stop transmitting to Luna Station, they’ll send another rover after us,” Terry said.

  “I know,” Frank said. After her first burst of cursing, Jane remained silent, but her expression held disgust, fear, and some other thing Frank couldn’t name. He repeated, “We have to do this,” and put on his helmet.

  He and Cam stepped into the air lock, stood quietly for a long moment, and stepped out onto the surface of the moon.

  67: SOLEDAD

  THE TURKO, an armored taxi able to stop ordinary bullets and the milder forms of roadside bombs, crept through the crowded streets of Brooklyn. Windowless, it transmitted views of the outside on a small viewscreen. The driver was a huge black man in a fez who wielded his joysticks as if they were butcher knives, in short, hard chops. He either didn’t recognize Lucca or didn’t care. Lucca had handed over his Beretta, which now lay on the turko’s sealed-off front seat until the cab reached its destination. The backseat smelled strongly of disinfectant.

  Soledad stared at the viewscreen. Arab souks, jammed with hanging djellabas and bright cushions and squatting men drinking tea. On the next block, bodegas, which in turn gave way to a twisting lane of movable foamcast shelters. The turko could barely squeeze between them. Children darted after a soccer ball, adults swarmed like clamorous bees. Houses painted turquoise or silver, with crowds of women gossiping on the crumbling stoops. Signs in Russian, Arabic, Spanish, languages Soledad couldn’t identify. Open stalls with black-market electronics and halal meat. Basement bars, Coptic crosses, gunges. Veiled women, bare-breasted women, young men in skimpy purple vests that displayed augmented muscles to the cold air. The noise was astonishing, a constant blended roar over which suddenly rose wailing from an unseen minaret. The sidewalk crackled with pop-ups.

  “Soledad,” Lucca said quietly, “whatever we find here, I want you to know something. I’m not helping you sort out all this in order to influence how you see the Atoners and their lies about an afterlife.”

  It was enough to wrench her out of her stony silence. “I didn’t think that.”

  “Good.”

  “Why would it even occur to you that I’d think that? I know you’re being a good friend, a . . . a big brother.”

  “Good,” he repeated, and unzipped his jacket. The motion sent a wave of scent toward her: expensive leather and Lucca’s unwashed body. Tension gave him a jawline like stone.

  They turned onto a quieter street flanked by dilapidated houses that might have once been grand. In front of 1437, the old-fashioned painted number just barely discernible, the turko stopped. Lucca paid the driver, reclaimed his gun, and stuck it in the back waistband of his jeans under his open leather jacket.

  Soledad started up the drooping steps. In her hand she clenched James’s cashmere sweater. Lucca followed closely. Soledad sensed someone else fall in step behind Lucca, but So
ledad didn’t turn around. Let the agent follow them in, as long as he or she didn’t try to stop Soledad. Let the agent witness, yes. It couldn’t matter.

  A dark first-floor hall with no metal detectors, no lobby, no visible security; the only surveillance camera had been shot out. A broken scooter leaned in a corner. Six reinforced metal doors, three to a side, opened off the hall. Lucca steered Soledad to 1C, at the back, and pressed the bell.

  The surprising thing was that the door opened. A woman stood there, a young brown woman with short black hair crackling around her head. She smiled, unafraid, and exposed one red tooth. Lucca gave a small gasp. Soledad might have turned around then—Lucca was not the sort that gasped—but she felt rooted, as if she might never move again. The light in the hallway was dim and the light in the apartment apparently off, but Soledad could see the woman clearly. Small. Red toothed. Smiling. Pregnant.

  “Pizza, yes?” the girl said, her accent very heavy. But the smile faded as she realized that there were two—three, how the fuck many Soledad no longer knew—people standing in the hallway.

  “Frabilothatel!” James, completely naked, dashed into sight behind the pregnant girl, who opened her mouth to say something just as a gun fired and the end of everything began.

  68: CAM

  AS CAM STEPPED OUT ON THE MOON, nerves as electrified as a cow fence, she had a crazy thought: The future depends on human hair. Just what Sissy at the Cut ’n Curl in Jay, Nebraska, had always said: It’s all about the hair, honey. With the right hair you can go anyplace.

  Cam laughed and Frank turned in his bulky suit to look at her. Over the suit-to-suit radio he said, “Silence.” She thought of reminding him that he’d turned off all transmissions to and from the rover but decided against it. He was just being cautious, his usual anal-retentive self. Well, no, not just that—the prick was also afraid she would say something out loud about hair. He’d never trusted her, she was only here because she could arrange for the trip. Well, fuck Frank. Whatever the reason, Cam was here, and together they were going to restore what the Atoners had taken away. Just spreading the Atoner message apparently wasn’t enough. It should have been, but it wasn’t. What it got everybody was suicides and death threats and weird cults. This way was better.

  She scanned the rocks dotting the plain, hoping Frank could remember where he’d left his packet of hair. The Atoners had taken their shuttles back inside the Dome, or melted them down, or maybe sent them home—who knew? Cam didn’t see any scorched area like the one Soledad had left when she used a shuttle to cremate Aveo’s body. (Aveo—where was he now? Stay focused.) That meant there was no way, in the featureless plain, to know if they now even stood on the same side of the Atoner Dome as the shuttles from Kular had come down last summer and fall.

  Frank walked slowly, scanning the ground. Clumsily he dropped to his knees and began moving stones about the size of a kitchen garbage can. Cam noted the general configuration of the closest rocks: two gray ones roughly the same size, then an even larger reddish one a yard closer to the Dome. She touched Frank on the shoulder, pointed to the rock arrangement and then farther along a circumference around the Dome, and pantomimed looking. He nodded and pointed to one of the gray rocks.

  It was slow work. They had an hour’s worth of air, Frank had said. No one knew what they were looking for, and Terry would have no way of knowing what they found.

  “They’ll search us,” Cam had said.

  “I’ll swallow the hair if I have to. It’ll take a few days to work through my digestive system, if I don’t eat anything.”

  Eeeeuuuuwwww. But if that’s what it took. . . . “Are you sure scientists can get the DNA out of your shit?”

  “Yes. I researched it online.”

  Cam crawled around on her knees. Nothing, nothing, nothing . . . A voice on the radio. “Frank and Cam! Come back inside the rover right now!”

  Terry. How had he gotten loose of his bonds to turn on the radio?

  Frank’s voice said inside her helmet, “We’ll be back soon, Terry.”

  “Now!”

  “How did you get loose?” Cam said, despite herself.

  “Come in now! You can’t get into the Atoner base—don’t you think that NASA’s tried?”

  So that’s what Terry thought she and Frank were doing: knocking on the Atoners’ door. Well, good. The curve of the Dome now shielded them from the rover’s sight. But what if Terry drove the rover straight at them? . . . Would he do that? Would he try to kill them?

  Why not, Cam? You killed everybody on Kular who interfered with what you wanted.

  “Come in now!” Terry sounded like Cam’s mother calling her in from play when it got dark outside.

  Cam risked talking to Frank. “How much air left?”

  “Half an hour. Silence, Cam.”

  Bossy bastard. Desperately Cam searched for two gray rocks the size of a garbage can with a reddish rock a yard closer to the Dome. Nothing, nothing . . . No rover drove around the Dome. The rocks weren’t hard to move in the light gravity, but her bulky EVA suit made lifting or even rolling them awkward. She couldn’t remember which of the two gray rocks Frank had looked under, so in each pair she had to move both. Nothing, nothing . . . What if she missed a pair of gray rocks? Please don’t let me miss it. . . . Some of this dust had been lying around her undisturbed for thousands of years, Terry had said. Nothing, nothing . . . You must play kulith better than that, ostiu . . . Nothing . . .

  “Cam. Come.”

  A hot retort leaped to her lips—she wasn’t a fucking dog!—but then her mind caught up with her indignation and registered Frank’s tone. She ran toward him.

  In his glove, a gleam of yellow, shocking in this gray landscape.

  She stared. Yellow cloth, surprisingly filmy . . . Frank shook moon-dust off the delicate bundle. Couldn’t he have found any sturdier cloth? This looked like it came from a negligee or something . . . Frank, you secret stud. Cam’s head swam. She laughed out loud.

  The yellow packet in one hand, Frank crossed himself with the other and lowered his head. Praying. Well, it was all right for some, but Cam felt sudden worry snap at her like a Rottweiler. If Terry and Jane were loose in the rover, they would get the jump on Frank and Cam as soon as they entered the rover in their clumsy EVA suits. They might take away the hair. Maybe Frank could swallow it in the air lock, in the brief time between repressurization and the sliding open of the inner door. Terry wouldn’t kill them by fucking with the air lock, would he, or even locking the rover from the inside or—

  “Cam!”

  She looked up. Frank pointed over her shoulder, swinging his arm so wildly, in such an un-Frank-like way, that he lost his balance and fell. Cam almost lost hers as she spun to face the direction he pointed: at the Dome.

  A section of it had opened, and an Atoner walked toward them.

  69: ARTWORK IN MS. JUDY KESINGER’S

  SECOND-GRADE CLASS, TOPEKA, KANSAS

  Gramma

  If you can see this frum the sekund rode then draw one mor flowar so I no.

  thank you.

  Your frend

  Hannah

  70: LUCCA

  LUCCA HEARD THE SHOT, grabbed Soledad, and hit the dirty floor of the hallway. Nothing to roll behind, nowhere to hide her . . . cazzo. He shielded Soledad’s body with his own and groped for his Beretta.

  Another rapid string of shots. He was hit, his leg, it burned as if acid had been thrown on it. . . . He got the Beretta free and raised his head—who the hell to shoot at? The hallway was full of people, all of them screaming. A body fell beside him, spurting blood but still firing a semi-automatic, the bullet explosions so loud it deafened him to all other sound. Some of the flying blood hit Lucca’s eyes, obscuring his vision. He swiped it away and again tried to see whom to aim at. Then he was pushed so hard that his injured leg sent fire directly into his brain, pain so intense that for a moment he barely noticed that the Beretta had been snatched from his hand. It fired inches from
his head, the explosion of sound adding to the agony in his leg to create a red cloud that he could actually see, so that nothing else was visible but that crimson haze, like the finest of blood droplets shrieking and dancing in the air. . . .

  Then his mind cleared, the pain became bearable, and he was looking up at Soledad, on her feet and holding Lucca’s gun in the perfect two-handed stance he had taught her behind the mountain cabin.

  “Drop the gun, Soledad. Now,” said a voice rigid with forced calm. Lucca knew that voice, had heard it . . . His mind fumbled and he tried to turn his head, but the slight movement again sent pain racing along his nerves. But he knew the voice; he had heard it often enough on surveillance recordings. Diane Lovett, from the American Agency.

  Lucca’s Beretta crashed to the floor. He reached for it, but Diane said, “No, Lucca,” and he let it lie. Blood poured from his thigh, but despite that, his vision abruptly expanded, as if a zoom lens had suddenly snapped on, and every detail of the hallway became preternaturally clear.

  A man lying dead beside him, eyes staring sightlessly at the L-shaped crack in the ceiling, a small red-rimmed hole from Lucca’s gun just above the bridge of his nose.

  Soledad lurching over the body to kneel beside James, whose naked body had been so torn by bullets that it looked like the ground veal of Lucca’s cook.

  Diane Lovett lowering her gun, walking toward him, picking up the Beretta with two delicate fingers, glancing sharply at Lucca.

  All the other people, each limned so clearly in Lucca’s mind that he could have identified them even years later: the three other agents, the fat woman in the orange skirt who was still screaming, the peering boy clothed in rags and curiosity, the man with dark curly hair and full beard holding an unfired shotgun and looking uncertain whether any of the others threatened his home and, if so, whom he should shoot.